It's not that you know the artist first and then say "this art is cool because I like the artist". The art is the means by which you know the artist. The more of their works you encounter, the closer you get to understanding the artist and what they are trying to communicate.
Doesn’t that also create a kind of immunity, though? If what I see is a cacophony of differing views, then I am unlikely to be influenced by any particular sock puppet account.
Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.
I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
I wonder if it would be possible to have gone directly to Zed, without going through Atom first (likewise, Plan 9 would never have been the first iteration of a Unix-like OS). "Rewrite it in Rust" makes a lot of sense if you have a working system that you want to rewrite, but maybe there's a reason that "rewrite it in Rust" is a meme and "write it in Rust" isn't. If you just want to move fast, put things up on the screen for people to interact with, and figure out how you want your system to work, dynamic languages with bytecode VMs and GC will get you there faster and will enable more people to contribute. Once the idea has matured, you can replace the inefficient implementation with one that is 10% of the size and 10x the speed. Adding lots of features and then pruning out the ones that turn out to be useless may also be easier than guessing the exact right feature set a priori.
No, we are using this thing called a metaphor. What's being compared is the relationship between the hangman and the ropemaker, and the relationship between the app developer and the OS vendor. There is no comparison between taking screenshots and hanging people.